One year after Beeswax’s acquisition by Freewheel and Comcast, we’re on the precipice of some exciting product releases that will have major impacts on how we buy CTV. While Beeswax has always done well with video and has increasingly specialized in CTV over the last several years, the increased CTV technical expertise and supply relationships from Comcast and Freewheel enable enhanced in-market capabilities. Today we’ll dive into the technical underpinnings of these advantages and how they’ve helped our customers achieve success.
A Renewed Focus on Supply Curation
Beeswax’s Advanced Filtering Technology has always given customers precise control over what supply they access, how they scale niche targeting, and how they pay for their bidder. These advantages have long allowed customers to side-step supply throttling and sampling inherent in other DSP options in-market and have provided greater flexibility in uncovering additional reach to specific data segments, geos, and custom inventory packages. Pre-acquisition, this was historically done through the lens of each supplier being a third-party with a standard RTB integration. We have continued to invest in third-party supply, with access to over 60 providers, including strong relationships with every major CTV supply-side platform in the programmatic market today.
Curated Access to FreeWheel’s SSP
We’ve also invested heavily in enhanced access to Freewheel, a premium TV marketplace for buyers and sellers, with a “who’s who” of premium video suppliers, including several of the top channels in your TV guide such as NBCU, also a Comcast-owned company. Add some of the most scaled out next gen streaming platforms to that list, as well as many legacy MVPDs and cable companies, and you start to get the picture of why we say FreeWheel is the gateway to premium programmatic.
FreeWheel combines the targeting and measurement of digital with the scale and quality of linear TV. They use technology, data, and premium inventory to enable buyers and sellers to transact across all screens, data types, and sales channels to achieve results for marketers. With billions of requests across 80+ premium publishers and a 99% view-through rate, we’ve been hard at work adding the FreeWheel library of pre-packaged deals directly into the Beeswax UI for better discovery, quicker setup, and easier self-service workflows. But the advantages of having Beeswax and FreeWheel under one roof do not stop with pre-packaged deals. We have teams like Marketplace Activation who speak with our publisher partners to design custom packages, publisher specific deals and programmatic guaranteed buys for Beeswax customers. FreeWheel’s programmatic supply is now native to the Beeswax platform and is fully available to buy today, in all its forms.
A new marketplace model for the modern age of CTV
The FreeWheel team is knee-deep in a multi-year project to migrate its publisher video ad-serving supply-side footprint, from the legacy Sticky Ads supply-side tech to a first of its kind, next-gen, integrated Marketplace Platform that sits within the ad-server. This undertaking has a myriad of transformational benefits, and the vision of this upgrade is centralized sell-side decisioning and buy-side access within a single, two-sided marketplace.
Beeswax has launched the industry’s first buy-side module into the new Marketplace Platform, via “Freewheel Advanced Marketplace Access.” The benefits are numerous:
- Verified Transactions: Freewheel verifies all buyers and sellers within the Marketplace to ensure that transactions are free from the intervention of malicious third-parties, giving buyers and sellers peace of mind.
- Streamlined Buying: With the entire transaction transpiring in the ad-server vs. via an intermediate exchange, the buyer only needs to win once—there is no winning the SSP auction, but losing at the ad server. This reduces latency, increases win rates, and gives buyers more of what they want, faster and more efficiently
- Transparency and Predictability: In traditional programmatic transactions, SSPs generate PMP bid floors, but buy-side traders need to engage in guess work to determine where they’ll clear. This is frequently an arduous task, requiring manual input of multiple rates to uncover the sweet spot of delivering what you need at a price that will perform. Beeswax’s integration with the Freewheel Marketplace Platform pulls forecasting data directly from FreeWheel’s ad-serving footprint, ensuring the most-accurate delivery and pricing information available. Freewheel Advanced Deals Access provides insight into predicted clear price and scale right in the Beeswax UI. As a result, guesswork is minimized.
- Control: Moreover, because the data coming from the ad-server comes to the Freewheel Advanced Marketplace Access tool in real-time, Beeswax buyers can adjust their advanced deals on the fly, overlaying different targeting, adjusting the publisher footprint, and more!
- Granularity: Finally, the Freewheel Marketplace platform is unfettered by the confines of the open RTB spec. As publishers migrate and standardize their buy-side data exports for each bid request, the Freewheel Advanced Marketplace will have the ability to target inventory qualifiers not found in programmatic today.
To learn more about how Beeswax and FreeWheel can help you take advantage of premium, curated supply, please reach out to us at info@beeswax.com
